Through word choice we begin to see a picture of darkness and gloom. Poe sets the stage with dark colors and words like terror.

Ultimatly, The Raven illuminates the grief and sadness of the narrator who has lost his love Lenore. Focusing on the narrators grief layers the terror more subtly than had the poet simply pointed it out.

Poe lost his wife at an early age, and some biographers have claimed that this wife may have been the inspiration behind Lenore.

The Raven is a poem filled with allusions which help to ground it in the real world taking the comfort of abstraction away from the reader. It would be easy to ignore the uneasiness that the poem exhibits if one could imagine it in a speculative world, but the allusions to our world remove that possibility.

Nepenthe is a univeral cure for sadness that comes from Homer's "The Odyssey".

“Prophet!” said I, “thing of evil!—prophet still, if bird or devil!

By that Heaven that bends above us—by that God we both adore—

Tell this soul with sorrow laden if, within the distant Aidenn,

It shall clasp a sainted maiden whom the angels name Lenore—

Clasp a rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore.”

Quoth the Raven “Nevermore.”

Aidenn is the arabic word for the Garden of Eden.

“Be that word our sign of parting, bird or fiend!” I shrieked, upstarting—